Trump Is Not Deporting Only "Criminals"
President Donald Trump made a promise with his mass deportation plan: First, we’ll remove the “criminals.” In doing so, he framed his fear-fueled immigration enforcement overdrive as a purge for public safety. But the evidence—from reports on the ground, available data, and precedent—points to a different direction: immigration raids’ numbers boosted by the arrest of immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.
“There is no way for the Trump administration to achieve any of its enforcement goals without targeting immigrants with no criminal histories,” noted Austin Kocher, who researches immigration enforcement. And that’s exactly what is happening. NBC News and NPR recently reported that scores of immigrants without criminal histories have been arrested.
From the beginning, the idea of deporting “millions and millions of criminal aliens” was deceiving. For starters, there aren’t that many deportable undocumented immigrants with criminal records in the country. (Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens.) Of the 7.6 million immigrants on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s national docket for potential deportation, the agency reported that about 8 percent had a conviction or pending charges. The most common offenses? Traffic-related, according to ICE’s data.
Researchers also found that deportations under Secure Communities had no significant impact on reducing crime rates or making communities safer. Instead, East explained, the rate of crimes being reported to law enforcement went down. “Once local law enforcement agencies start getting involved in immigration enforcement activity,” she said, “it creates a lot of distrust and fear among the immigrant community about interacting with law enforcement at all. ”Broad enforcement activity, East said, “necessitates that we’re going to end up detaining and deporting people who are not the intended targets.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/trump-deportation-criminals-statistic-ice-you-cant-only-deport-criminals/
It's going to be interesting to see what happens with the crime rate with the deportations. I wouldn't be surprised of crime went up du to the increase in poverty and hardships on people due to Trump's policies. What they don't understand is that these people are an integral part of the economy. They are doing work that most US citizens don't want to do: mowing peoples lawns, working in the fields. working in hot kitchens, manual labor, meat packing plants. Republicans have scared people into thinking this is necessary.
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